What

One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities

Between one’s self and the weather and the things

Of the weather are the belief in one’s element,

The casual reunions, the long-pondered

Surrenders, the repeated sayings that

There is nothing more and that it is enough

To believe in the weather and in the things and men

Of the weather and in one’s self, as part of that

And nothing more. So that if one went to the moon,

Or anywhere beyond, to a different element,

One would be drowned in the air of difference,

Incapable of belief, in the difference.

And then returning from the moon, if one breathed

The cold evening, without any scent or the shade

Of any woman, watched the thinnest light

And the most distant, single color, about to change,

And naked of any illusion, in poverty,

In the exactest poverty, if then

One breathed the cold evening, the deepest inhalation

Would come from that return to the subtle centre.

VIII

We live in a camp … Stanzas of final peace

Lie in the heart’s residuum … Amen.

But would it be amen, in choirs, if once

In total war we died and after death

Returned, unable to die again, fated

To endure thereafter every mortal wound,

Beyond a second death, as evil’s end?

It is only that we are able to die, to escape

The wounds. Yet to lie buried in evil earth,

If evil never ends, is to return

To evil after death, unable to die

Again and fated to endure beyond

Any mortal end. The chants of final peace

Lie in the heart’s residuum.

How can

We chant if we live in evil and afterward

Lie harshly buried there?

If earth dissolves

Its evil after death, it dissolves it while

We live. Thence come the final chants, the chants

Of the brooder seeking the acutest end

Of speech: to pierce the heart’s residuum

And there to find music for a single line,

Equal to memory, one line in which

The vital music formulates the words.

Behold the men in helmets borne on steel,

Discolored, how they are going to defeat.

Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun

Some things, nino, some things are like this,

That instantly and in themselves they are gay

And you and I are such things, O most miserable …

For a moment they are gay and are a part

Of an element, the exactest element for us,

In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things

And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,

That we are joyously ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element,

And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if

There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,

A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,

The will to be and to be total in belief,

Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.